Across the Pond (9 page)

That Americans are overweight is a stale cliché, but it is perhaps less hackneyed to note that one reason for this is their parochialism. Many of them have no idea that the planet is not populated by people just like themselves. Nor could some of them fit into the aircraft seats that might allow them to find out. Admittedly, it is not as though they would instantly shed a hundred pounds if they were to discover that everyone in Armenia or Montenegro is as skinny as Victoria Beckham. Even so, the fact that the United States constitutes a whole universe of its own may make people less troubled by the fact that they need a small crane to swing them out of bed. America is its own norm. It finds it hard to view itself from the outside. It is not greatly taken with cultural comparisons. Euphemism plays a part here too. Obese women are “full figured,” fat children are winsomely “chubby,” and men who need a whole train compartment to themselves are admired for their “hearty appetite.” Beer bellies can be a sign of virility.

Grossly overweight Americans plod cheerfully around unaware that there are some countries in which they would probably be forced to hide in caves, emerging only at dusk to scavenge great mounds of food and drag it furtively back to their hideouts. In some authoritarian regimes, they might even be flushed off the streets along with beggars and prostitutes when some international sporting event hits town. There is, to be sure, a lot of obesity elsewhere on the planet, but nobody is as mind-warpingly, transcendentally enormous as an enormous American. People who are wide enough to block the aisle of a supermarket can be found in the United States, but are far rarer in Europe, though the numbers are growing, thanks to America’s multinational purveyors of junk food. It is doubtful that many of them are even to be found hiding in caves in the Pyrenees, assuming they could squeeze into them in the first place.

Perhaps Americans can afford to be obese because they have so much space to expand into. People in the States will say “Excuse me” if they come within ten feet of you, since they are accustomed to having so much of the stuff at their disposal that they expect you to feel intruded on. On the Tokyo subway, by contrast, you can sit in someone’s lap for half an hour without their realising. (On the London Underground they would notice but pretend that you weren’t there, fearful of making a fuss.) It is an attempt to avoid such trespasses that causes me to write so many books. Reading books by other people has always struck me as an unwarranted invasion of their personal space. This is why when I wish to read a book, I write one. It is a way of respecting the privacy of others.

An English friend of mine who visited the United States for the first time came back with only one scene recorded on his videocamera. It was of a freight train, passing silently and endlessly, apparently without end or origin, with ridiculously more cars than one would see in Europe. It was an image of infinity. Like God, America seems to go on forever. Bits and pieces of it are scattered throughout the globe. It crops up wherever you look, like heartache or cherry blossom. Perhaps there is a secret U.S. colony on Saturn. The nation compensates for the brevity of its history with the boundlessness of its space. The American self is more likely than the European soul to see itself as infinite, partly because it has so little history to hamper it, and partly because it has so much space to spread into. If Europe is smothered beneath history, America languishes for lack of it.

Bumming a Fag

When it comes to the body, there is also the question of smoking. One of the several American objections to the habit, one that encapsulates many of the nation’s phobias and anxieties, is that it constitutes a kind of illicit connection between people, shrinking the space to which they can rightfully lay claim. It is a symbolic mingling of bodies, and as such offensive to American individualism. Another objection is that smoking is a pure act of ingestion, one which, unlike eating, lacks all biological value or necessity. As such, it symbolises the transgressive movement, from outer to inner and out again, in its starkest form.

It is true that the American aversion to smoking is at root eminently rational, given the horrendous consequences of the habit. But the moral fervour with which the subject has been invested in the States, along with the zeal with which the hapless smoker is sometimes hounded, suggests that there is more to the matter than rationality. It is possible to act unreasonably in a reasonable cause. Smoking in the States is never just smoking, rather as one sometimes suspects that the last thing food is is food. Smoking represents a sinister infiltration of the other into one’s hygienically sealed world. America thus has its fair share of smoking fascists. There have been literal smoking fascists too. Hitler was fanatically opposed to the habit, and banned it from his bunker even as Soviet tanks were bearing down on it. He was also hysterical about germs, a neurosis shared by many middle-­class Americans. There is some evidence that Osama bin Laden also banished smoking from his compound, though it is unlikely that his image will be blazoned on U.S. anti-smoking posters.

In America as in Europe, the anti-smoking campaign is basically a class conspiracy. By and large, the working class continue to smoke while the middle class have given it up. Banning cigarettes is clearly an attempt to entrench middle-class power over a working class whose demise may now be literal as well as sociological. Many middle-class Americans seem to have abandoned drinking as well. I once came across a couple of American acquaintances of mine sitting at a table in the bar of a Dublin theatre without even an orange juice in front of them. You can be prosecuted for that in Ireland. In today’s China, by contrast, heavy drinking can get you promoted, while moderate imbibing can ruin your professional prospects. One can harm one’s career by not downing an excessive number of drinks with one’s colleagues. Job advertisements sometimes explicitly ask for applicants who can hold their drink. “Candidates with good drinking capacity will be given priority,” read one for an engineering company. It is hard to imagine a similar ad for Goldman Sachs. If you are a binge drinker, which is true of over half the men and more than a quarter of the women who drink in China, it may be advisable to mention it on your CV. There is certainly no other way in which it is likely to smooth your progress through life.

Middle-class America is rather more abstemious. Charles Dickens complains in his
American Notes
about the absence of alcohol in his hotel, where he is forced to drink tea and coffee instead. “This preposterous forcing of unpleasant drinks down the reluctant throats of travellers,” he grumbles, “is not at all uncommon in America.” Perhaps it was not uncommon then, but it was certainly untrue of the early American Puritans. Drinking alcohol was quite acceptable to them, if only because their water tended to be contaminated by human and animal waste, milk before pasteurisation was risky, and coffee, tea and chocolate were yet to catch on. It is true that the Irish do not require such austerely rational grounds for knocking back booze, or indeed any rational grounds at all, but neither did the early Puritans. There was regular feasting and partying among them, along with singing and even card-playing. One Puritan minister wrote that sexual intercourse should be conducted “willingly, often, and cheerfully.” He meant, of course, between husband and wife. The earliest American immigrants enjoyed themselves a lot more than some of their grim-faced progeny. They also differed from them in their profound respect for tradition, as well as in their vision of human society as an organic whole.

It was a lack of fun that struck Dickens about America, long before the fun industry was invented there. He found its earnestness mildly oppressive. Philadelphia seemed to him “distractingly regular. After walking about it for an hour or two, I felt that I would have given the world for a crooked street. The collar of my coat appeared to stiffen, and the brim of my hat to expand, beneath its Quakerly influence. My hair shrunk into a sleek short crop, my hands folded themselves upon my breast of their own calm accord, and thoughts of . . . making a large fortune by speculations in corn, came over me involuntarily.” Speaking of Calvinist gloom, he confesses that “I so abhor, and from my soul detest that bad spirit, no matter by what class or sect it may be entertained, which would strip life of its healthful graces, rob youth of its innocent pleasures, pluck from maturity and age their pleasant ornaments, and make existence but a narrow path towards the grave.” There is an odious spirit of “stiff-necked ­solemn-visaged piety” abroad in the nation, which a writer who at one level clearly prefers his Fagin to his Oliver Twist finds hard to stomach. He would have been astounded by Las Vegas. Since Dickens’s day, pleasure and enjoyment have been among the United States’s most precious heritage to humanity.

Tidying the body away to avoid unpleasantness is a familiar American practice. People do not die, they pass away, rather as an exploding spaceship is not a calamity but an anomaly. Toilets or lavatories become restrooms or bathrooms. The British find it amusing to be asked by American tourists on trains where the bathroom is. Being a disgustingly unhygienic bunch, they would never dream of taking a bath on a train themselves. I once overheard a young American tourist phoning home to her mother in the middle of Dublin. “Mom,” she whispered, aghast, “they have stores here full of dead animals!” She presumably meant butcher’s shops. These days in the States, the Mafia probably wrap their victims in Saran Wrap before hoisting them on to meat hooks.

Samuel Butler’s novel
Erewhon
, published in late-nineteenth-century England, portrays a civilisation in which illness is seen as a moral defect, while vice is regarded as a kind of disease. The latter view is untypical of America, since it smacks too much of moral determinism. Nor do Americans see illness as a moral failing. Some of them, however, seem to feel that it is morally offensive to take a negative view of it. Developing cancer may not be anti-American, but complaining about it certainly can be. Barbara Ehrenreich notes in her invaluable
Smile or Die
that breast cancer is often referred to in the United States as a “gift.” Some sufferers wouldn’t be without it, just as they wouldn’t be without their Siamese cats or Shetland sweaters. Instead of being life-changing in the sense of killing you, it is life-changing in the sense of making you a more caring, sensitive person. There are those of us who would prefer to be brutal, insensitive and alive.

Given the American penchant for euphemism, it is a wonder that dying is not spoken of as “transformatively transitioning,” as in “Seven of the rebels were wounded, and three others were transformatively transitioned.” In the same upbeat vein, being thrown out of work is sometimes redefined by the magic of the signifier as a “career-changing opportunity.” Only whiners would object that some changes are undesirable. Some Americans seem to hold the bizarre view that change is a good in itself, as though swapping your brandy and soda for a cup of cold vomit is bound to represent an imaginative leap forward. They would be astounded by Samuel Johnson’s remark that all change is a great evil. They would also be right to reject it, though not because all change is a great good.

The Pleasures of Indolence

It is no secret that Americans are deeply anxious about their bodies. In fact, if U.S. television ads are to be believed, they are worried about them to the point of mass psychosis. A nation’s media is not of course a faithful image of its actual life. If that were the case, all Americans would be in a permanent state of orgasmic joy, would never cease to grin manically or have toddlers tumble joyously all over them, and would have teeth so sparkling that those around them would need shades. When I once visited an American dentist plagued by acute toothache, I was surprised to find that the first question on the form I had to fill out was “What do you feel about your smile?” This seemed rather like being asked how you felt about your hairstyle when admitted to hospital for brain surgery.

The media, needless to say, do not habitually tell it like it is. Even so, they distil something of a culture’s abiding preoccupations, in however monstrously distorted a guise. In this sense they are rather like dreams, which present real thoughts and desires in garbled, disfigured form. If the social unconscious of the United States is to be credited, all is not well with the flesh and blood of the Land of the Free. Americans today have a problem about being incarnate creatures, rather as their Puritan forefathers did. They would not readily agree with Thomas Aquinas that human rationality is an animal rationality, and that it is the body, not some disembodied mind or spirit, that is the criterion of human identity. Aquinas would have believed in the existence of the disembodied soul of Jimi Hendrix, but he would not have believed that it was Jimi Hendrix. American culture is typically more dualistic, as befits a people so extraordinarily idealistic that the mind can never feel quite at home with anything as lowly as matter.

Take, for example, the business of staying in bed. Among the hard-working American middle classes, this is not the most popular of pastimes. Americans tend to rise in the morning earlier than Europeans, and go to bed earlier as well. There are clear economic motives for this, but also, one suspects, a queasy puritan sense that indulging the body by not dragging it brutally out of bed at the crack of dawn is somewhat sinful. An American mother I know used to run the washing machine and make school lunches for her children at three o’clock in the morning. People who do this should be handed lengthy prison sentences. Visitors to the States who stay in hotels will have had the traumatic experience of hearing what sounds like a dam bursting around six o’clock in the morning. This is the sound of fifty showers being switched on, at an hour when any civilised human being would still be agreeably unconscious.

Americans do not seem to realise what a rich, fruitful, endlessly fascinating pursuit staying in bed can be. Rather as English aristocrats have taken centuries to perfect the art of doing nothing at all, a strenuous, demanding affair which requires a good deal of skill, persistence and unflinching concentration, so staying in bed can be a passion, a vocation, a religion, an existential commitment, a whole way of life. Those who stay in bed form a kind of secret spiritual aristocracy. They are a cosmopolitan confraternity, recognisable to each other by certain shyly murmured passwords and esoteric handshakes. Sometimes they compete with each other to see who can remain supine until dinner time, sternly suppressing any ignoble impulse to get up. They do not regard sleeplessness as a virtue, any more than insomniacs do.